#eve babitz

©Julian Wasser, 1963, “Nude pondering her next move”

Eve Babitz with Marcel Duchamp. Read the story behind the photograph here.

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Eve Babitz

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.

“These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and travelled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces went West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting - like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.” 

- Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood